Happy Valentine's Day!

Today is Valentine’s Day – or, as Hubby likes to refer to it, Extortion Day!

Since Feb. 1 Hubby has been anxious. Valentine’s Day and my birthday fall only one day apart. Since shortly after Christmas we’ve been barraged with commercials on television showing love sick men getting down on bended knee.

Those advertisements have been urging men all over the world to be romantic with flowers, chocolate or jewelry–regardless if that’s the kind of person your man is.

There is so much emphasis put on Valentine’s Day I can’t blame men for feeling insecure about it.

I also think as women we get so caught up in the advertisements that we actually start seeing our partners as an image of those love sick guys on the commercials.

I will take half the blame for causing Hubby stress on Valentine’s Day. It depends on the day if I like chocolate, I’ve already gotten a diamond from him and apparently one time when we were dating I told him I hated flowers.

According to him, I said they were a waste of money and I’d rather have something that lasted longer than three days.

For the record, I don’t hate flowers. Red roses are my favorite, but at this point I’d take a dozen dandelions.

I have to wonder if when I said I would prefer something more long-lasting than flowers on Valentine’s Day, I could have been subtly hinting for something else–possibly a diamond ring?

Hubby did propose to me in a very romantic way. It was Christmas after our first year of dating and he handed me a wrapped gift. I opened it to find a journal in which he had chronicled events of every month since we’d met that made him grow to love me more each day.

At the end of the book, on the last page, he’d written that he wanted to ask me a question. When I looked up at him he was holding an open ring box and asked if I would marry him.

Awwwwwwww......

Now Hubby likes to think more on the practical side of life. This year for my birthday he gave me a heated mattress pad. Something that will be put to use on cold winters nights and will definitely last far longer than three days, he said proudly when he gave it to me.

Which was a couple of weeks before my birthday.

He gave it to me early–the weekend before he left for Vegas.

It was thoughtful that he wanted me to stay warm while he was gone.

All kidding aside, Valentine’s Day shouldn’t feel like a test for couples.

It shouldn’t be about buying the perfect gift or making the right romantic gesture and worrying that if you don’t, your significant other will feel jilted.

Personally, I think people take it too seriously. It’s a Hallmark holiday that results in extortion of guys like Hubby just trying to make their partners happy.

Valentine’s Day is all about spending time with the people that are important to us.

Valentine’s Day is a day for me to show the people in my life who I really care about that I love them. It’s not about gifts or expensive dinners or money—-it’s the thought that I have some pretty special people in my life and I am pretty darned lucky to have them!

There are some people out there who cannot stand Valentine’s Day and everything it represents. But for me, I want to show love to everyone who is in my life, not just my significant other. Valentine’s Day is a great time to do that.